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Debates about the new welfare, and the new social policies that go (or should go) with it, share an emphasis on risk-prevention strategies and pluralistic risk management. Focusing specifically on the risk of unemployment, this article discusses the case for so-called preventive worker-directed active labour market policies as part of the new welfare architecture. These policies are aimed at preventing unemployment and promoting labour-market transitions and employability. They involve responsibilities on the part of the state, social partners and employers. First, the case for these policies is elaborated by analysing the social investment, flexicurity and transitional labour-market literature. In this context, several issues related to the feasibility of the pluralistic management of preventing unemployment, as well as the possible impact of pluralistic risk management on dualisation, are discussed. Secondly, recent policy initiatives in the Netherlands are presented as an illustration of the incremental emergence of preventive worker-directed active labour-market policies. It is argued that although these policy initiatives were initially introduced as responses to the crisis, they may eventually turn out to reflect a more fundamental reorientation in managing and dealing with the risks of unemployment. The conclusion critically reflects and argues that pluralistic risk management may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the insecurities of flexible and non-standard workers.

Social policy responses to the recent economic crisis have varied considerably across advanced capitalist countries. This study aims to explain this cross-national diversity through a qualitative comparative analysis of labour market policy responses to the Great Recession across eighteen advanced welfare states. The results of the study suggest that theories of welfare state change that attribute theoretical centrality to political and institutional factors do not provide a compelling explanation for patterns of labour market reform observed since the onset of the economic crisis. Rather, they appear to be explained principally in terms of the variable fiscal capacity of the state. In particular, the study findings indicate that the presence of fiscal crisis has acted as a necessary (but insufficient) condition for the presence of recommodification, while the absence of fiscal crisis has acted as a sufficient (but unnecessary) condition for the absence of recommodification. These empirical developments suggest that there is a need for a scholarly return to the problematic relationship between capitalism and the welfare state.

The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of UK and pan-European social policy issues – including links to source materials and commentary. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

This article argues that constructions of social phenomena in social policy and welfare scholarship think about the subjects and objects of welfare practice in essentialising ways, with negativistic effects for practitioners working in ‘regulatory’ contexts such as housing and homelessness practice. It builds into debates about power, agency, social policy and welfare by bringing psychosocial and feminist theorisations of relationality to practice research. It claims that relational approaches provide a starting point for the analysis of empirical practice data, by working through the relationship between the individual and the social via an ontological unpicking and revisioning of practitioners' social worlds.

In 2011, the UK Coalition government introduced its flagship welfare-to-work programme, ‘The Work Programme’ (WP). Based on a ‘payment by results’ model, it aims to incentivise contracted providers to move participants into sustained employment. Employer involvement is central to the programme's success and this paper explores the ‘two faces’ of this neglected dimension of active labour market policy (ALMP) analysis: employer involvement with the programme and the engagement between providers and employers. This paper draws empirically from a regional survey of primarily private and third sector SMEs, and from interviews with providers and stakeholders about provider engagement with SMEs and large employers. Findings indicate that SMEs had recruited few staff through the WP and had little awareness of it, and that providers engaged in intense competition to access both SMEs and large employers. Employers are critical to the success of ALMPs, but an underpinning supply-side ideology and a regulatory context in which business interest associations are weak policy actors means that their involvement is based on implicit and flawed assumptions about employers’ interests and their propensity to engage.

User and community co-production of public services first became topical in the late 1970s, both in private and public sectors. Recent interest has been triggered by recognition that the outcomes for which public agencies strive rely on multiple stakeholders, particularly service users and the communities in which they live. Extra salience has been given to the potential of co-production due to fiscal pressures facing governments since 2008. However, there has been little quantitative empirical research on citizen co-production behaviours. The authors therefore undertook a large-sample survey in five European countries to fill this gap. This article examines an especially significant finding from this research – the major gulf between current levels of collective co-production and individual co-production. It explores the drivers of these large differences and examines what the social policy implications would be if, given the potential benefits, the government wishes to encourage greater collective co-production.

We investigate the labour market situation of older individuals in Europe in relation to their previous employment history as well as the regulations relating to employment protection legislation and early retirement. Specifically, we look at the competing risks of early retirement and late career unemployment. The central research question is whether policy effects differ according to the characteristics of an individual's previous work history. We employ data for twelve European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE) and estimate multilevel regression models. The results show different mechanisms for the risks of unemployment and early retirement. Late career unemployment results from individual factors related to fragmented careers, marginal employment and short tenures. In the case of early retirement, we find the interplay of individual and policy factors to be crucial. Persons with consistent careers have an increased probability of early retirement, but only in countries with generous early retirement benefits. However, employment protection legislation appears to counteract early retirement for this group of individuals. We conclude that policy factors do not have uniform effects for older individuals, but should rather be viewed against the background of previous developments in individual career paths.

This paper focuses on policies of credit inclusion in Kuwait as a way of unravelling the complex relationship between citizenship, social policy, and credit. Kuwaiti citizens enjoy the status of super-inclusion but expatriates suffer from exclusion. Super-inclusion for Kuwaiti citizens reaches beyond access to credit and includes its distribution, methods of dealing with default and the repayment of debt. In the post-Arab Spring period, the gap has widened between these two groups within the population as citizens attempt to secure a greater share of the country's financial resources in exchange for social peace.

This paper considers implications for the English voluntary sector of recent shifts in the terms of engagement with the state following rapid political and policy changes under the UK Coalition government. It explores how ideas of what constitutes the voluntary sector are being reconstructed in policy and practical settings, examining processes contributing to re-shaping the voluntary sector's conception of itself and beliefs about legitimate activities and aspirations. It draws on theories of institutional isomorphism and governmentality to explore these changes which appear to be modifying and restricting the voluntary sector's role in social welfare, limiting its influence and its ability to act simultaneously within and against the state. The paper argues the integral role of the state in recasting the roles of different sectors but also discusses the extent to which voluntary sector compliance is necessary to ensure organisational survival, asking what spaces exist for independent activity and resistance.

The shift to the workfare state has brought about ways of governing welfare subjects, the practical implementation of which has often been delegated to private state agents and their street-level bureaucrats. In the neoliberal paternalist state, the words and deeds of these street-level agents become even more relevant in order to understand the impact of contemporary social policies. This article focuses on the case of migrants in the Netherlands, who are problematised in particular as (potential) welfare subjects. By analysing the civic integration programme content for migrants, it reveals the responsibilising and disciplining discourses and practices used to promote the ideal of citizen-worker. That the task of inculcating the virtues and skills demanded by neoliberal policies has been transferred to private course providers makes state ideology all-invasive. While the lack of integration and participation is linked to individual failure, the state loses its social face in the process.

User involvement has become an explicit goal within social service provision. Even so, the term remains ambiguous, and its implementation troublesome. Implementation theory lists a number of factors influencing bureaucratic behaviour; in this paper we investigate the ‘human factor’. Our ambition is to provide a framework for analysis of user influence in activation programmes that includes the individual characteristics of both service users and service providers. Building on theoretical insights from the literature on activation and agency, we develop a framework that distinguishes between two ideal types of service users: Pawns and Queens, and two types of service providers: care-oriented Carers and rule-oriented Clerks. This framework is then applied to identify key challenges for the interaction between users and caseworkers in two challenging situations: when service users express little or no agency and when they express agency that is incompatible with the overall goals of the programme. We find that Carers show pronounced reluctance to overrule the choices made by service users even when they have conflicting views – and tend to postpone decisions when they interact with Pawns. Clerks tend to overrule the decisions of Queens when they have conflicting views, and to make decisions on behalf of Pawns. The analysis draws on data collected from 126 qualitative interviews with service providers and participants in the Norwegian Introductory Programme for immigrants and a survey of 320 caseworkers.

The Irish poor law debate of the 1830s has largely been overlooked, but is a substantial source in understanding the impact of social theory concerning ‘virtue’ on social policy making in the early nineteenth century and on into the present time. The Chair of the Royal Commission for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (1833–36) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, a leading figure in intellectual endeavour in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although his contributions to theology, economics and education have been reassessed, his central role in poor law thought is not well understood. This article examines the key tenets of his social theory and reassesses their impact on the Irish poor law debate. Whately was an Oxford Noetic (Greek for ‘reasoners’) committed to merging the study of natural theology and political economy in order to encourage ever greater levels of virtue on individual and societal levels. He believed that individual and social lives were designed to advance through the reciprocal exchange of labour, goods and ideas in a free and open market economy. Ireland in the 1830s presented the ideal opportunity for Whately to express his theory of moral growth and social advance in terms of poor law policy, directed towards modifying circumstances to make possible the development of individual abilities while avoiding measures which would encourage vice or discourage virtue.

There is currently debate in policy circles about access to ‘the upper echelons of power’ (Sir John Major, ex Prime Minister, 2013). This research explores the relationship between family background and early access to top occupations. We find that privately educated graduates are a third more likely to enter into high-status occupations than state educated graduates from similarly affluent families and neighbourhoods, largely due to differences in educational attainment and university selection. We find that although the use of networks cannot account for the private school advantage, they provide an additional advantage and this varies by the type of top occupation that the graduate enters.

The issue of reconciling ethnic diversity with the welfare state is a subject of long-standing theoretical debate. In particular, it remains unclear to what extent a shared national identity is necessary for endorsing claims to welfare at the individual and societal levels. Surveys show that migrants are seen as the least deserving category of welfare recipients. Yet migrants’ own views are rarely considered. Based on a qualitative study, this paper explores how Polish migrants residing in London conceptualised their deservingness to British welfare benefits and social housing. It finds a strong preference for conditionality of welfare predicated on contributions through work, payment of taxes and law abidance. Such conditionality applied to both in-group and out-group members thus transcending identity-based claims. These contributions were seen as both necessary and sufficient for laying claims to the British welfare system. Solely needs-based claims were seen as problematic.

Data from household surveys have increasingly been used as a basis for social policy. They are generally inappropriate for obtaining information about the poorest, and therefore for policies concerned with tackling poverty and deprivation. They omit certain groups by design: the homeless; those in institutions; and mobile, nomadic or pastoralist populations. In addition, in practice, they typically under-represent those in fragile, disjointed or multiple occupancy households, those in urban slums and those in areas deemed as insecure. These sub-groups constitute a pretty comprehensive, ostensive definition of the ‘poorest’.

The sources of worldwide estimates of the missing populations are briefly described, with those for the UK discussed in greater detail, paying attention to their likely income and wealth. At least 250 million of the poorest of the poor are omitted worldwide; and in the UK about half a million of the poorest are missing from survey sample frames.

In the UK, these ‘missing’ population sub-groups bias the analysis of income inequalities and affect the validity of formulae that have been developed for the geographical allocation of resources to health and social care.

The Southern European countries share a similar welfare system which does not perform well either in terms of equity or efficiency. Using EUROMOD, the EU-wide microsimulation model, this paper evaluates the enhancement of both the redistributive and the incentive effects of the Italian tax-benefit system by introducing either a family-based or an individual in-work benefit, financed through the abolition of the existing tax credit targeted at dependent adults. The results show an increase in the labour supply of women both in couples and lone mothers, in particular among the poorest, with important redistributive effects. The in-work benefits can contribute to the de-familialisation of the Mediterranean welfare states by reducing the reliance on the family and compensating the cost of services.

There is evidence that teacher judgements and assessments of primary school pupils can be systematically biased. This paper tests the proposal that stereotyping plays a part in creating these judgement inequalities and is instrumental in achievement variation according to income-level, gender, special educational needs status, ethnicity and spoken language. Using 2008 data for almost 5,000 pupils from the Millennium Cohort Study, it demonstrates biases in teachers’ average ratings of sample pupils’ reading and maths ‘ability and attainment’ which correspond to every one of these key characteristics. Findings go on to suggest that stereotypes according to each of income-level, gender, special educational needs status and ethnicity all play some part in forming these biases. The paper strengthens the evidence that stereotyping of pupils may contribute to assessment and thereby attainment inequalities, and concludes that an increased focus on tackling this process may lead to greater parity and a narrowing of gaps.

‘Creaming’ and ‘parking’ are endemic concerns within quasi-marketised welfare-to-work (WTW) systems internationally, and the UK's flagship Work Programme for the long-term unemployed is something of an international pioneer of WTW delivery, based on outsourcing, payment by results and provider flexibility. In the Work Programme design, providers’ incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ differently positioned claimants are intended to be mitigated through the existence of nine payment groups (based on claimants' prior benefit type) into which different claimants are allocated and across which job outcome payments for providers differ. Evaluation evidence suggests however that ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ practices remain common. This paper offers original quantitative insights into the extent of claimant variation within these payment groups, which, contrary to the government's intention, seem more likely to design in rather than design out ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’. In response, a statistical approach to differential payment setting is explored and is shown to be a viable and more effective way to design a set of alternative and empirically grounded payment groups, offering greater predictive power and value-for-money than is the case in the current Work Programme design.

This article analyses and compares the multi-dimensional co-ordination of employment and social policies at the Italian local level, especially focusing on the policy implementation stage. It departs from developing a theoretical framework to take into account the crucial variables that might potentially impact on the co-ordination of social cohesion policies. In particular, following a neo-institutionalist approach, great emphasis is placed on the legacy of the Weberian bureaucratic model, and its implied ‘specialisation ethos’. In addition, the effect of other contextual variables, such us social capital and the rate of unemployment, are considered.

The empirical analysis confirms the crucial impact of the specialisation ethos in preventing inter-policy co-ordination from occurring at the Italian local level, and the relevance of other contextual variables in causing policy integration within services, rather than between services.